One of the horror genre's "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer's Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.

Saturday, October 03, 2015

In
the second fifteen minute installment of Jason of Star Command (1979-1980),
titled “Prisoner of Dragos,” we meet the series’ charismatic villain for the
first time.

As played by Sid Haig, Dragos
is quite evil, and quite dedicated to his plan of “total conquest” of “the
entire galaxy.” He also seems to have quite an array of technology (including eye lasers...) at his disposal.

As
part of his plan of galactic conquest, Dragos knocks Jason (Craig Littler) unconscious and fashions
a duplicate known as an “energy clone.” Once programmed, this individual will
look and act exactly as Jason would, all while furthering Drago’s agenda of
chaos.

Worse,
as Jason discovers, the Commander Canarvin (James Doohan) he rescued in the
previous story was also an energy clone.
Now, that villain has been returned to Star Command while the real
Canarvin languishes in the Dragonship prison...

“Prisoner
of Dragos” moves at a fast-clip, a lot like an old pulpy movie cliffhanger, but
this episode is notable for adding some sets and characters to the drama. We meet Dragos for the first time, and also
see the interior of his magnificent and monstrous Dragon Ship.

I
find it interesting that the Dragon Ship -- like the Star Command -- is built
upon an asteroid, in this time a kind of orange-hued one. I wonder if space vessel construction occurs
on asteroids on this scale because of the need for gravity. The giant asteroids of Space Academy/Star Command
and the Dragonship may provide such gravity, thus preserving the “ships” energy for other
crucial tasks or services (including life support, weapons, and defense.)

Still,
the Dragon Ship hails from a “dark mysterious” galaxy, and so the fact that it
shares a construction technique with Earth technology suggests something vital,
I think about in-universe space travel.

At any rate, it’s fun to speculate about.

This
episode also introducesthe crucial plot-twist of the series’ Year One narrative.

Energy clones belonging to Dragos have
infiltrated important positions in Star Command, and this replacement has been
carried out in secret. In 1980, this
very idea -- android duplicates – was the crucial plot-point in the TV series Beyond
Westworld. More recently, the idea found play in the re-booted, post-9/11 Battlestar Galactica re-imagination. Considering the evil dictator/terrorist villain and this sleeper cell sub-plot, it is fair to state that Jason of Star Command is ahead of its time.

On a more literal level, throughout
this season, “energy clones” cause a lot of trouble for Star Command and Jason,
and here our hero must undergo the duplication process himself.

Fans
of Space
Academy (1977) may also realize by this juncture that the source of Filmation's inspiration has changed from Star Trek to Star Wars. This episode -- like all episodes of the first
season of Jason of Star Command -- is more interested in capture, rescue and
battles, than in the examination of human morality and confrontation with
diverse alien cultures.

This week, on Space Academy, Commander Gampu (Jonathan Harris) and cadet Laura Gentry (Pamelyn Ferdin) investigate a nearby black hole from the relative safety of their Seeker. Investigative results are "negative," but then the ship disappears inside the black hole, and the personnel are feared lost.

Meanwhile, back on Space Academy, Laura's brother Chris Gentry (Ric Carrott) is desperate to rescue his sister but meets with resistance from Paul Jerome (Ty Henderson), a new cadet on the team.

He's from a "pioneer planet" where "survival was the name of the game" and he hasn't gotten used to being part of a team yet. He only wants to look after himself.

But Chris is adamant, and on a Seeker mission with Jerome, Tee Gar Soom and Peepo, the resident robot...)

Gentry detects Laura's presence via their unusual mind-linking ability. His Seeker travels to "star speed" through the black hole, and emerges on the other side, at a desolate planet.

There, on the surface, the team confronts a giant creature. The creature is angry, and capable of rendering itself invisible for short spells.

Paul saves the day by distracting the creature while Chris and Tee Gar rescue Laura and Commander Gampu. In other words, he thinks of others before himself.

Space
Academy’s
(1977) second episode, “Castaways in Time and Space” might seem like a basic or
rudimentary space opera tale, but it is very strong in terms of its handling of
the series characters.

The
narrative concerns a Seeker -- with Laura (Pamelyn Ferdin) and Gampu (Jonathan
Harris) aboard –inadvertently traveling through a black hole and becoming
stranded on an alien world. Laura’s
brother, Chris (Ric Carrott) is desperate to rescue her, but is thwarted at
times by the new recruit, Paul (Ty Henderson), who possesses a different moral compass.

As
I’ve noted before, I teach a college level course, Introduction to
Intercultural Communications, and what it concerns is the fact that we shouldn’t
always judge others by the standards of our culture, if they are from another
one.

Instead, we should understand and respect other cultural traditions, just
as we would like to see our traditions similarly respected. That’s what the dynamic between Paul and
Chris really concerns here: two cadets from very different cultures, working
together on the same mission. Chris
misunderstands Paul’s behavior as being selfish, or even cowardly, when in fact,
Paul is from a planet where survival is difficult, and he possesses a different
-- but not necessarily inferior -- code of ethics.

In
the end, Paul is true blue, of course, and proves that he is a hero, regardless
of his cultural differences, and that’s a great message to send to kids (or adults for that matter). We might not always go at problems the same
way as our neighbors, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help each other, or
achieve great success side-by-side.

In
terms of special effects, Space Academy again impresses. Here, the alien life-form that lives on the
planet on the other side of the black hole is rendered using stop-motion
animation, and there’s even a scene involving a Seeker crash on the planet
surface. Overall, the series compares
very favorably to other (more expensive) American sci-fi series of the era,
including Battlestar Galactica (1978) and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981).

Two
things age “Castaways in Time and Space.”
The first is slang.

One of the
characters in the drama is called a “turkey,” which is in perfect keeping with
the 1977 real life context, but not so good for the 40th century or
so.

And Loki and Peepo play a very
primitive-looking computer game version of Tic-Tac-Toe.

Friday, October 02, 2015

Mary
Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s Monster are experiencing quite a
resurgence lately in the modern found footage film format. For instance, The Frankenstein Theory
(2013) imagined Adam, the Monster, lurking in the 21st century Arctic (and
still seeking a mate).

And
the absolutely genius -- and mad -- Frankenstein’s Army (2013) imagines
that a descendent of Dr. Frankenstein continues his ancestor’s twisted work
creating life (or abominations, depending on your point of view) in World War
II Europe.

I
liked and enjoyed The Frankenstein Theory, though it is very much in keeping with
conventional found-footage film standards. Basically, that film involves the
hunting down, in our high-tech modern age, of a local legend by a film crew in
an isolated environment.

Frankenstein’s
Army is
similar -- narratively speaking -- to that description, but is a period piece. More importantly, Frankenstein's Army is visually like no
film ever conceived or executed. Director Richard Raaphurst’s movie boasts an
anarchic energy in terms of both execution and visual imagery that renders it a
truly disturbing and unique cinematic experience.

Meanwhile, matters
of plot and character in Frankenstein’s Army are secondary to the idea of this film as an immersive, first-person experience, a
first person tour of Hell on Earth.

Specifically,
the film involves Russian soldiers (including a filmmaker) stumbling upon Dr.
Frankenstein’s laboratory facility and encountering -- one after the other --
the most horrific, imaginative, astounding monsters you can imagine.

These
inventive and insane creatures are crafted with practical make-up, prosthetics
and bizarre costumes -- no CGI whatsoever -- and the film wallows in messy
blood and guts too.

Accordingly,
Frankenstein’s
Army is sickening and nasty, but it is nonetheless a film you won’t be
able to look away from. The visuals are,
in a word, amazing. And as weird and
perverse as they clearly are, they are also grounded in solid production values
and presentation. For example, the film
benefits from a washed-out color canvas that suggests World War II propaganda
films, and the period details are observed accurately.

Rewardingly,
there’s also a thematic method to the film’s visual madness. In the closing moments of
Frankenstein’s
Army, Dr. Frankenstein brushes off a soldier's commentary that he’s insane for
transforming human soldiers into cyborg monstrosities.

Why
is he so dismissive?

Well,
how can anyone accurately make the case that his madness is that awful in a world
in which Nazis and Soviets are battling each other for world domination?

Why
is this most individualistic mad scientist -- by any stretch -- sicker or more
dangerous than those two destructive ideologies and their advocates?

The
answer, simply, is that he is not. He’s
small potatoes by comparison.

The
Russian and German soldiers who have committed themselves (and indeed, their
lives…) to murderous, genocidal regimes are thus exposed for what they are: hypocrites. What they’re doing is fine and dandy, but
Frankenstein’s transplant surgeries are insane?

Thus
Frankenstein’s
Army reveals a world of mad monsters and bloody transplant surgeries,
and notes -- somewhat caustically -- that these creations are hardly more
sinister or alarming than man’s propensity to destroy himself in wars over
ideology and belief systems.

Frankenstein
may be mad. But he is not alone in that condition.

It’s
a mad, mad, mad world.

“You’re
an educated man: what do you think is happening?”

A
Soviet filmmaker, Dmitri (Alexander Mercury) is embedded with a platoon of
soldiers as they advance into Germany during WWII.

The group happens upon an industrial
factory which is actually the laboratory of a mad scientist, Dr. Viktor
Frankenstein (Karel Roden). The mad
scientist has been using live human beings and arcane machinery to create a new
breed of super soldier.

In
truth, Dmitri has known about Frankenstein all along, and is on a mission to
recruit the scientist to the Soviet Union.
The good (or mad…) Doctor has different plans, however. He decides that Dmitri should chronicle his
creation of machine/man hybrid/super soldiers.

Dmitri
has no choice but to agree, and watches as some of the soldiers he has
befriended go under the doctor’s bloody knife…

“A man of vision is always
misunderstood.”

In
terms of ingenuity and sheer variety, Frankenstein’s Army is the most
impressive “creature” horror movie to come down the pike since Clive Barker’s Nightbreed
(1990).

This
found footage film introduces viewers to an array of monstrous, hideous
creations of remarkable breadth and depth.
The most notable is, perhaps, Mosquito, a giant black specter on
serrated stilts with a functioning drill for a mouth. This guy is truly fearsome in his Nazi helmet
and gas-mask.

And
Mosquito is just the bloody tip of the creature effects iceberg.

One
of my favorite monsters in the film is Propeller-head, a biped with a plane
engine housing and functional propeller blades for a head. As you can imagine, things get messy when
Propeller-head is nearby.

Then
there are other remarkable beings: Razor Teeth, Grinder, Hammerhead, Machete,
and Dentist.

One creature -- zompod? –
is just a cauldron or container on tiny human legs. He dutifully follows Dr.
Frankenstein about the lab, his pot-top opening and closing. He’s kind of a
malevolent horror version of R2-D2.

These
creepy creations are inventive, and beautifully show-cased. They are successful boogeymen not merely because
of their bizarre, steam-punk-ish appearance, but because they move about, on-set so convincingly.
As I’ve written before, I can stomach CGI in science fiction films when the
technology is utilized to create landscapes or alien vistas.

But
the horror genre is about flesh and blood, and CGI is too clean, too unreal,
too lacking in gravity, to carry the right visual impact. Frankensttein’s Army is
grounded in reality…crazy, sick, perverse reality, and I love the visceral,
organic nature of the visualizations.

There’s
a terrific, sustained shot late in the film wherein Dmitri runs deeper and
deeper into the blighted industrial laboratory facility. He turns one corner,
is confronted by a monster, turns another corner and encounters another
monster, and so on. This composition
continues at impressive length, and generates tension at the same time that it
introduces the colorful Frankenstein’s beasts. The immediacy of the first person
camera is coupled with the shock of real, monstrous creatures coming out of the
woodwork and the effect is electric.

Frankenstein’s
Army settles
down in a chamber of horrors during the final, extended scene after a lot of
running around and violent death scenes. Frankenstein takes center stage
himself, and the audience gets a close-up look at his insanity. At one point, for instance he attempts to
meld the frontal lobes of a Nazi and a Communist, in an attempt to bridge their
different philosophies.

On
one hand, this is clearly insane.

On
the other hand, Frankenstein’s approach of physically joining opposing
view-points in one brai is an acknowledgment that humans have a difficult time
understanding people who are different from them. Frankenstein attempts to
forge peace by bringing the two opposing philosophies together in one
organ. His experiment is an utter
failure -- and nuts, of course -- and yet at least he has peace in mind…somewhere.

It’s
difficult to say the same thing for the other characters. Both the Nazis and the
Soviets covet Dr. Frankenstein because he can help them destroy an enemy, not
forge peace between people. And the
soldiers -- who on first blush may seem like innocent victims of a mad doctor
-- have committed their very mortality to destroying other human beings. In this light, and given the atrocities of
World War II, it is difficult to make the claim that Frankenstein is any madder
than the Nazis or the Soviets. The life that
Frankenstein creates is twisted and perverse, but he sees it (importantly) as
work that will help and improve humanity. His motives are good, but his logic
and reasoning are terrible.

The
other characters in the film are largely delineated in terms of how they can
use people for their own ends, whether pro-social or not. For example, Dmitri
betrays his fellow soldiers and is on a secret mission for the Kremlin. His mission is to recruit Frankenstein, or a
loved one who is being held hostage will die. But again, Dmitri is
placing someone he knows (and presumably agrees with, philosophically) over the
lives of others. How is that any better
than Frankenstein’s crazy plan for world peace?

I
don’t approve of Frankenstein or his twisted experiments and ambitions. My
point is merely that in a world of insane people, he hardly seems like the
worst offender. A catalog of atrocities
committed by Hitler and Stalin demonstrates that such madness exists in reality,
and can be far worse than the creation of monsters.

Frankenstein’s
Armyimpresses structurally because it works, essentially, as a tour guide
of the most hellish place on Earth. Armies clash. People die. And then there’s
Frankenstein’s experiments. The first
part of the film is all action, and the last part is a close-up look at one
man’s particular brand of madness. Because of the backdrop of world war, it is
impossible to see Frankenstein in a vacuum.
He is not an aberration; he is fully part of a world in which technology
and ideology are being used to kill people by the millions.

The
negative reviews for Frankenstein’s Army focus largely on the lack of a developed
narrative and fully-dimensional characters.
I understand those complaints, but Frankenstein’s Army is a visual
masterpiece that informs us about our world (or how our world looked, mid-20th
century).

For its uniqueness and creativity, for its
commentary on real madness (world war), and for its amazing monsters,
Frankenstein’s Army deserves attention, and the love of genre fans seeking
something that is both old-school and revolutionary at the same time.

Thursday, October 01, 2015

If
you came of age watching sci-fi movies in the 1980s and 1990s, one fact was
clear: Arnold Schwarzenegger had rapidly become the genre’s most valuable
player.

The
actor and future governor went from strength to strength in the form of The
Terminator (1984), Predator (1987), The
Running Man (1987), Total Recall (1990) and T2
(1991). Rewardingly, he rose to the top of the action star pack by embracing
the genre rather than shunning it.

By
contrast, Sylvester Stallone didn’t begin making sci-fi based films (like Demolition
Man [1993] and Judge Dredd [1995]) until the early
1990s, and by then, Schwarzenegger had all but cornered the market.

How
did he do it?

In
particular, Schwarzenegger seemed to have an authentic knack for picking good
projects and good collaborators. Some would call this knack his “business”
sense, but that isn’t entirely fair. It’s an artistic sense too.

But
the actor also seemed to understand another significant fact: that his presence
in a film was only one part of the successful movie equation.

The
other piece involved serious science fiction concepts (like time travel),
mind-blowing twists, and even embedded social commentary (The Running Man).

Total
Recall, Schwarzenegger’s
1990 collaboration with Paul Verhoeven -- the auteur of RoboCop(1987) and Starship
Troopers (1997) -- represents perhaps the trickiest and most
twist-laden of those efforts, and is something of a high-water mark for the
actor, post-Terminator.

Loosely
based on Philip K. Dick’s 1966 short-story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,
the film concerns a man who discovers that his whole life is a lie consisting
of implanted memories…a lie which places him at the heart of an interplanetary
conspiracy to keep the good people of Mars down, and keep cheap, clean air off
the market.

Accordingly,
Total
Recall might be interpreted two competing fashions.

The
film either exactly as it appears to be: a straight-forward (though left-leaning…)
action/sci-fi film about a near-future fascist state in which profits matter
more than people, and one man discovers the truth…and joins the revolution.

Or
the film is about a man suffering from a “schizoid
embolism,” -- a psychological breakdown -- living out implanted memories that
have no bearing on reality.

In
the film, Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) submits to a memory package called an “ego trip” that transforms him,
essentially, into an outer space secret agent.

Afterwards,
the adventure we witness is, therefore, a psychotic episode.

Indeed,
virtually every development in the narrative from the physical appearance of
freedom-fighter Melina (Rachel Ticotin), to the map of Mars’ alien pyramid, to
the remarkable notion of “blue skies on
Mars” appears both in Quaid’s travel agent/ego trip package and in the
ensuing adventure.

Ultra-violent
and yet ceaselessly entertaining, Total Recall thus plays with reality
in a way that would forecast the decade’s big sci-fi action hit, The
Matrix (1999), right down to a scene in a hero is implored to swallow a
red pill and see reality for what it is.

I
suppose it’s tempting to witness all the blunt-faced, brutal, over-the-top
violence of Total Recall and dismiss the movie outright. Yet even the film’s
violence fits into Total Recall’s either/or dichotomy, representing a future of
over-militarized police, or, contrarily, a world of the imagination where the
death of innocent bystanders (as human shields) matters not…because they are
just avatars in a fantasy, not real flesh and blood life forms.

“Take
a vacation from yourself.”

On
Earth, a lowly construction worker named Quaid (Schwarzenegger) dreams of Mars and
a mysterious woman (Ticotin) there. He wants to relocate to the Red Planet, but
his wife, Lori (Sharon Stone) doesn’t think it is a good idea. Instead, Quaid goes to REKAL, a company that
can implant two-week’s worth of memories into his brain.

Quaid
selects the “ego trip” memory package, in which he visits Mars as heroic secret
agent. But something goes wrong during implantation,
and Quaid grows confused about reality. Is he a secret agent, or isn’t he?

Soon,
Quaid’s wife, his best friend on the job, and shadowy pursuers all attempt to
kill him.

Before
long, Quaid learns that he was once Hauser, an agent working for Coohagen
(Cox), dictatorial governor of the Federal Mars Colony. Now, it is up to Quaid to take Hauser’s
knowledge and save the people of Mars from Coohagen’s tyranny.

The
only way to do that, however, is to create an atmosphere on Mars using an
ancient, alien machine hidden in the sealed off pyramid mine….

“That’s
a new one: blue sky on Mars.”

The
science fiction films of Paul Verhoeven slyly go after the tenets of extreme
right wing philosophy (and the Reagan eighties). There are other science
fiction films, of course, which attack precepts of the left such as Statism (see:
THX-1138) or communes (see: Zardoz) but that’s not
the case here.

RoboCopimagines a world
in which everything -- even the police force -- is run as a private business or
enterprise and corporations run amok, literally stomping on the little guy on
the way to shoveling in the profits.

Meanwhile, Starship
Troopers is set in a world of mindless nationalistic propaganda in
which nuance and reason can find no purchase in the head of any pretty (male or
female) soldier during wartime.

Total
Recall is not
far afield of these films in terms of its philosophical underpinnings. The
future here is one in which corporate logos dominate the landscape, both on
Earth and on the Federal Colony on Mars.

And
wall-sized TV screens constantly report biased news stories (coming from the
mouths of beautiful women…) about the “terrorists” on Mars who are disrupting
the flow of minerals, and therefore both the Northern Bloc’s war effort, and
the flow of commerce.

Cohaagen
(Ronny Cox) is the governor of Mars and he is responsible for the business
practices that sold “cheap domes” on
Mars, and turned a whole sub-set of colonists into genetic mutants or
freaks. Cohaagen reveals terrible
disdain for them and notes that the “lazy
mutants” think they “own the mine,”
when of course…he does.

Even
worse, Cohaagen charges money for air, a resource that ought to be free to any
living being. He declares martial law
and heavily polices Mars so that business is not interrupted by people
demanding more liberty. He also makes the people of Mars work for sub-par
wages, so that they can’t escape their economic enslavement.

The
mutant nature of the underclass in Total Recall is specifically designed
as a visual allegory for ethnic minorities and the poverty-stricken. The word “lazy”
as applied to mutants is a code word often adopted by racists.

Quaid
joins the revolution of freedom fighters, led by Kuato (Marshall Bell), and
activates an alien generator that will provide free air to everyone on Mars.
Make no mistake or misreading: this act represents a re-distribution of
resources from those in power to those without power. The whole corrupt system -- built on cheap
domes and expensive air -- is brought down by this act or rebellion, and the
worker is the one who benefits.

Again,
I seek not to litigate the politics of this issue, or to state that I agree or disagree
with the movie’s viewpoint. I only note
the many visual and verbal cues in the film support the philosophical framework
I diagrammed above, from the surfeit of corporate logos on the city streets, to
the propaganda-heavy news reports, to the many shots of poor-families gathered
together, choking to death for lack of free air.

Indeed,
Total
Recall fits precisely into the world-view one can detect in both RoboCop
and Starship Troopers, where wealth and power is concentrated in
the hands of the few at the expense of the masses. The film knowingly refers to Kuato as both a
terrorist and a George Washington
figure (fighting for liberty and independence), but it is clear where Arnie’s
character falls on that spectrum of thinking.
He takes the side of the rebellion, not entrenched authority, and never
looks back.

What
I find endlessly intriguing about Total Recall, however, is the “mind
fuck” or “ego trip” aspects of this work of art. Quaid goes to Recall (REKAL) and either learns
the truth about himself and his identity
(Story A), or slips hopelessly into delusional psychosis and experiences a “free
form delusion” (Story B).

If
we consider Story B for a moment, it’s amazing to see how much it makes sense
in context.

Quaid
goes to REKAL and is offered the “Ego Trip” package by the slick salesman
there. He shows Quaid a package in which he becomes a “secret agent” operating
on Mars.

When
Quaid is about to be implanted with the “Ego Trip”, the doctor shows him some
new upgrades to that package. It includes, explicitly, material about alien
civilizations on Mars. A screen nearby toggles through imagery of alien beings
and architecture. One such image is of the Air-Generator in the Pyramid
Mine.

Indeed,
it is exactly that generator, as we see in the last act of the film.

So
ask yourself, how does REKAL have access to the interior of a closed (and
guarded) Martian mine, and know about a top-secret machine that could alter
forever the balance of power on the Mars Colony?

The
answer is simple, REKAL couldn’t have that info. Instead, it has implanted this
imagery in Quaid’s memory. He then experiences a schizoid embolism, and then
his mind takes him on a tour of said implanted imagery. The mine is never real.
It exists only in the program, and then in Quaid’s schizoid mind.

In
the same scene, Quaid is asked to pick a “type” of lover he would like. He says
his orientation is “hetero” and the doctors begin programming a woman for him
to romance on his ego trip. She is not
just any woman, we see, but the operating room’s screen actually shows footage
of Rachel Ticotin’s Melina.

Again,
not a lookalike, not a doppelganger, actually
her. And then, after the embolism
event, Quaid encounters her. But she
exists not in the real world, only in the program and in his messed up head.

The
mitigating evidence here, perhaps, is that the film opens with a dream sequence
in which Quaid and Melina are seen walking on the canals of Mars together. He slips, she screams and tries to help him. So it is established that he is thinking of
Melina -- a mystery woman -- before
implantation, and therefore it cannot be a fiction created by the ego trip
programmers.

Yet
it is not impossible to believe that Quaid has
already been implanted as the movie starts, but has no memory of it.

In
other words, his trip to REKAL is included, actually, in the ego trip and the “secret
agent” package.

Think
about it for a moment: a trip to REKAL is the perfect place for a construction
worker to determine that he is actually the savior of the solar system. So
REKAL might be incorporated as part of Quaid’s movie-long fantasy, which
commences not with the trip to the company in the body of the film, but occurs
before the opening dream that awakens the inner secret agent.

By
the same token, the doctor informs the salesman that she has not yet “implanted”
the secret agent portion of the memory program. But, if the entire movie is an
implanted memory, her comment means nothing.
It is simply the mind’s way of rebelling against the idea that it is
living in a fantasy. Remember, when
Quaid asks if the memories feel real, he is told that his “brain will not know the difference.” So, to seem real, perhaps he must believe that
he was a secret agent all along and REKAL never implanted anything.

In
the same implantation scene, a doctor’s assistant looks at the ego-trip
architecture and quips. “That’s a new one…blue
skies on Mars.” A highly implausible Hollywood happy ending, right?

Yet
the film ends, of course, with blue skies on Mars, the end point of the
two-week “ego trip” memory implant.

A
second scene, later in the film, finds Dr. Edgemar (Roy Brocksmith) on Mars,
attempting to talk Quaid down, because he is having a psychotic break (schizoid
embolism). Notice the visual symbolism of this scene. The mise-en-scene is important.

Quaid is stationed on the left side of the frame, Edgemar in the middle, and a distorted reflection of Quaid (in a mirror) is on the right. This visualization represents the core of the Story B narrative. "Schizoid" means doubling or fragmenting of the mind, and this image shows us two Quaids, attempting to broach reality, with Edgemar as the mediator.

Edgemar tells Quaid that if he doesn’t ingest the red pill, he will lose all touch with
reality. He will be a savior one moment, a betrayer the next. This “free form delusion” will even include “fantasies” about an “alien civilization.”

He’s
a villain and a faker in Story A. But in
Story B, every single one of Edgemar’s theories comes true.

Melina
finally trusts Quaid, and then learns that he is actually Hauser, working
covertly against the rebels.

And,
in the end, Quaid countenances the tools in the pyramid mine, artifacts left
behind by an alien civilization.

Total
Recall plays
drolly with this idea that there are parallel tracks at work in the film (Story
A/Story B), and ends with a moment of incredible playfulness that honors both
possibilities.

Quaid
stands under the blue skies of Mars with Melina and says that the whole
experience is “like a dream.” She replies that he should kiss her before he
wakes up.

At
this juncture, Jerry Goldsmith’s score goes into a different mode, one that
suggests tension and anticipation, as if Quaid is about to wake up. The ego trip two-week vacation is ending, and
real life -- as a construction worker -- is about to come crashing back down on
him. You can’t miss the menacing quality
of the soundtrack at this juncture, as if the carpet is about to pulled out
from under us.

The
self-reflexive aspect of this ending is plain. We -- the audience -- have been “dreaming”
with our eyes open for two hours, watching the film. And now, it too is about
to end.

Back
to real life!

So
Total
Recall may merely be a story of revolution against the wealthy and
powerful on Mars, or it may be a story of a man undergoing a hallucination
because of a trip to the “brain butchers.” Either way, it is our dream at the cinema, captivating our attention, and finally,
ending with a return to reality.

I
remember when Total Recall first premiered, many critics complained about the
level of violence depicted on screen. There is a scene here of extreme violence
worth mentioning. Quaid is pursued through a train station. He goes up an
escalator, and runs into a trio of agents. They shoot at him, but miss, hitting
another man on the escalator. Quaid uses the man’s corpse as a human shield,
and then kills his attackers. Next, he throws the corpse down the escalator,
onto Richter (Ironside) and another pursuer. After they all get off the escalator,
Richter steps over the bloody corpse of one of his men without a look back.

This
is a pretty bracing scene, for certain, and yet it is not gratuitous. In some
ways, it is one of the most important scenes in Total Recall. If we are
following Story A, this violence is an indication, like the ubiquitous
corporate logos, of the overwhelming fascist state. Militarized police kill
citizens without warning, without regret, and without legal repercussions. This
is Coohagen’s preferred world, where the little people live and die by his
whim.

Contrarily,
if we follow Story B -- the “ego trip” -- there is no real violence in the
scene at all, and part of Quaid’s mind must realize that. The action is a
vacation “.fantasy,” like Call of Duty video-game, and the
people who get caught in the cross-fire are not real, mere avatars to make it
all seem real.

The screen is covered in blood in the film, and this is an intentional thing. Verhoeven even gives us a scene in which chunky rat blood pools on a view-screen, obscuring Quaid's visage. The screen then turns to the blood red of the Martian surface. This transition could be the trademark inage of the film (and Verhoeven's Story A/Story B parallel approach.)

Total
Recall may be
an action film on the surface, but it actually carries social commentary (about
the dangers of a fascist/corporate-controlled state), navigates carefully and
consistently a science fiction premise concerning the nature of reality, and
features probably the best cast of all Schwarzenegger’s sci-fi films.

Ronny
Cox is ruthless and terrifying as Coohagen. And Ironside is perfect as Richter,
showcasing the idea that menace comes from attitude and screen presence, not
from height or muscle mass. And Sharon Stone absolutely steals the first half
of the picture, vacillating expertly from “loving wife” mode to “fierce
assassin” mode. She switches back and
forth adroitly, sometimes between breaths.
And she is absolutely physically convincing in the fight sequences.

Only
Rachel Ticotin seems a little out of her depth here, as Melina, and that may be
intentional too. She is hemmed in by Quaid’s description of his perfect woman:
sleazy and demure. There’s not a big range she can travel between those two
adjectives. Her role feels like a commentary on female romantic leads in action
films.

Witty
and wicked, smart and subversive, Total Recall might just qualify, in
Quaid’s colorful terminology: “the best
mind-fuck yet” in Schwarzenegger’s sci-fi catalog.

About John

award-winning author of 27 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).

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